At Penn Law, four and a half minutes in silence after Ferguson decision

About 70 students laid in silence on the floor of Penn Law on Tuesday afternoon.

The students demonstrated in solidarity with protestors around the country after the St. Louis-county grand jury chose not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown. The protestors were on the floor of the Great Hall of Penn Law School for four and a half minutes to represent the four and a half hours Brown laid dead on the street.

“It felt long, and it’s a small fraction of the amount of time that Mike Brown’s body laid out there,” David Washington, a third-year Penn Law student and protest organizer, said in an interview after the event. “I think that in all the time that we all spent organizing and making sure it went off a hitch, we didn’t prepare for or think about the impact of the silence and how it would make us feel,” he added.

He said that the demonstration is a response to police brutality on the whole, not just the Ferguson court decision.

“I think that one of the most obvious and ridiculous things about the situation is that there is no tally, no count of how many people are being killed by police officers, he said. “You can only guess.”

The demonstration followed a protest organized by Students Organizing for Unity and Liberation on Monday. Over 100 students walked from DuBois College House to 33rd and Market streets. Similar to the Tuesday demonstration, those protestors laid in the intersection at 34th and Walnut streets for four and a half minutes.

“This is a small thing, a small event and it is a drop in the bucket,” Washington said. “We need to make sure to fill the bucket until it overflows.”

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